This photo shows a 'potentially revolutionary' moment Elon Musk has waited 15 years to see

Orbital rockets are complex, multi-million-dollar machines that
send our most precious satellites, supplies, and people into
space.

Yet since the dawn of the Space Age, they've all turned into
garbage the moment we ignite their engines.

That paradigm shifted in a major way on March 30, 2017:
when SpaceX — the rocket company owned by tech mogul Elon Musk —
achieved the
first-ever full reuse of an orbital-class booster, which is
the most expensive part of these launch systems.

"This is going to be a huge revolution for spaceflight. It's been
15 years to get to this point," Musk said during a live broadcast of the launch. "I'm at a loss for
words."

The event was historic not just for the launch of a
communications satellite into orbit atop a used rocket booster.
Minutes later, the major rocket part landed itself for
a second time on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean, as
SpaceX's newly released photos show.

It's really this moment Musk has been waiting for, since it means
his company can repeatedly launch and recover the biggest part of
its $62 million Falcon 9 rocket system:

To that end, Musk told reporters on Thursday that SpaceX will
soon try to launch, land, and re-launch the rockets in 24 hours —
an aggressive goal, but one that Musk said makes it "possible to
achieve a hundredfold reduction" in the
cost of getting stuff into space.

"This is potentially revolutionary," John
Logsdon, a space policy expert and historian at George
Washington University's Space Policy Institute, previously told
Business Insider. "Reusability has been the Holy Grail in access
to space for a long, long time."

However, Musk and his company aren't stopping their spaceflight
conquest with Falcon 9 rockets.

The company is also due to debut its similarly reusable but more
powerful Falcon Heavy
launch system this summer, send its first human passengers
into space
in 2018, and begin blanketing Earth with high-speed internet
using
4,425 satellites.